Fruits of Anthroposophy

Schmidt Number: S-4595

On-line since: 31st August, 2015

Lecture 8

The Social Question

Stuttgart,September 6, 1921

The imaginative, inspired and intuitive perception
I have attempted to describe to you presents to man the findings of
supersensible investigations that guide him towards his own essential
nature. It needs to be emphasized, however, that it is not a question
of achieving Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as such. These are
just tools for research in the supersensible world, in the same way as
scales, units of measurement, are used in the physical world. It is a
question of developing these research tools in spiritual science in such
a way that we take our starting point from something which is already
present in our ordinary consciousness, in our everyday consciousness,
in the consciousness on which ordinary science is based. We must, however,
find the right way of rising to this ordinary consciousness with its
potential for genuine ideas free from sensuality, ideas the mind is
able to grasp. All it needs is to bring higher life into an element
left unregarded in ordinary consciousness, and this will open the way
to supersensible worlds. Anyone wishing to become a spiritual scientist
himself must above all see to it that he holds in full awareness to
the same element which is also needed for genuine research in the physical
world, if such research is to yield results that are in accord with
reality.

What I have just told you
really applies only to the present age. This epoch in human evolution,
which started in the 15th century, has advanced to scientific research
as such, and in handling this type of research has also established
concepts in human consciousness that can be developed and given life
in the way I have indicated. In earlier times quite different methods
had to be used. Some hint of this has been given in references to the
yoga system, etc., but these older ways can no longer be ours. Just
as the things an adult person does in life cannot be the same as those
a child achieves, so the means used by civilized 20th century man cannot
be the same as those used in the ancient Eastern and Greek cultures.

We have to start from pure
thought, free from sensory elements, as I have tried to show in my
Philosophy of Freedom.
This sensation-free thinking is best developed — and
this may sound paradoxical — by entering into the study of nature
based on the scientific approach I have already referred to in these
evening lectures. It was not without purpose that I spoke of Haeckel's
approach, despite the fact that this has its faults, which I am able
to see and admit. This is a particular method of immersing oneself in
the evolution of animal and human life. If we strictly apply the discipline
spiritual research has to demand with regard to the sense-perceptible
world — living interaction of pure perception and pure thought — the
results we arrive at for the organic world as it presents itself to
external, sense-based empiricism are exactly those arrived at by Haeckel's
method. To create a vivid picture of what is achieved by this approach,
where external observation is penetrated with methodical thought, we
must proceed as follows. We cannot in that case produce all kinds of
speculations out of some kind of abstract thinking about a ‘vital
force’ of the kind produced by neo-vitalists. [ Note
1 ] Nor can we speculate on the basis of pure concepts as to whether
there is a supersensible principle or some such thing behind the things
we perceive outside us, when using our senses. No, we have to stick
to the world of facts the way Haeckel and his followers did. Spiritual
science specifically demands that the study of external nature must
be limited to this area, limited in this sense, otherwise speculation
about outer nature leads to nebulous mysticism. Inevitably I shall be
accused of materialism. Such accusation may also be given a special
twist by saying that I did previously present things from the materialistic
point of view but later abandoned this approach. There can be no question
of this. Such objections are foolish, coming from people who take a
very literal view and are unable to enter into the whole spirit of spiritual-scientific
research. It is exactly by limiting ourselves to phenomenology in the
study of nature that we are in a position to practise the inner renunciation
in our thinking activity which is necessary if we are not to follow
some nebulous mysticism but consider the phenomena as they present themselves
in the physical world. We shall then come to use thought activity merely
as an instrument, a method of working, I would say, in our study of
the outside world. In no way would it serve as some form of constitutive
principle, but as something that can go no further in any statement
made with regard to the sense-perceptible world than determine an order
among the phenomena of that outer physical world so that it reveals
its own secrets, which is of course entirely in the Goethean sense.
In practising such renunciation we shall come up against the limit set
in this field of research. At this point we do not embark on philosophical
speculation, coming up with all kinds of ideas as to a transcendental
element that is to be revealed. Instead, we begin to experience the
inner struggles and conquests that will not induce speculative thought
but instil an elixir of life into thought, as it were, so that thinking
activity now becomes transformed into the perceptions which then appear
in our Imaginations. Thinking will then be able to reach the world which
it can never reach through speculation, but only by metamorphosis into
supersensible perception.

It is only by using such means
to gain insight that man really comes alive to himself. It is by starting
from exactly this type of thinking and by keeping it with him throughout
that the spiritual scientist has to take everything he sees in imaginative
perception and reduce it to the form of a pure idea. Then anyone will
be able to follow what he presents in the form of ideas, provided they
pay the right kind of attention to ordinary consciousness. Even the
highest results obtained by the spiritual scientist can therefore be
verified, and only lazy minds can insist that it is necessary to enter
into the spiritual world oneself in order to verily those results.

When the results of Imagination
are revealed, man's soul perceives — and I have already described
this in these lectures — everything encompassed within his life
from the time of birth as one cohesive stream. The ego grows beyond
the here and now, sensing and experiencing itself within the whole river
of life, from the time of birth. As man advances to Inspiration, the
world he lived in before birth, or before conception, opens up before
him, and this is also the world he will live in when he has gone through
the gate of death. In this way, the immortal element that is part of
man's life becomes the object of his perception. In Intuition,
finally, the prospect opens up of repeated past earth lives. The things
anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of may therefore be defined
as such that the individual steps needed to achieve these results are
stated in every case, and that the results are verifiable, as I have
said, because they have to be expressed in thought forms that are accessible
to everyone.

Initially, therefore, man
is presented with the discoveries made in anthroposophical spiritual
science that relate purely to human nature. As we begin to find ourselves,
as we learn to express in summary form what we experience in our spirit,
in our ego, we arrive at the whole of our self opened out and spread
out, the self that encompasses temporality and eternity. We are able
to do so by making the findings of spiritual science our own. That is
how man finds himself, and it is for the time being the most significant
outcome in quite general human terms. At the same time, however, the
whole of man's consciousness is expanded. The findings made in
spiritual science arise from thought processes that have been enlivened
and re-formed and because of this also have an enlivening effect on
human souls when taken into those souls and tested for their truth.
As a result, human consciousness gains a new kind of insight into the
world. Let me first of all briefly describe two of the life fruits arising
out of this very expansion of consciousness, out of its intensification.

Today, we face the burning
social question. The elements which influenced social life right to
the present day arose from indefinite and subconscious human instincts.
Men established social systems that arose as though by a law of nature,
out of all kinds of instinctive backgrounds. This is evident to anyone
able to review social life with an unbiased mind. We are now living
in an age when such instinctive contingencies in the social organism
of humanity are no longer adequate. Just as the individual husbanding
of resources became tribal economy, national economy and finally world
economy, so the thinking applied to economics had to become more and
more conscious. For modern man the necessity has arisen to consider
the potential relationships between people involved in the economic
sphere and altogether what goes on between people who have to get along
together in social life. It has to be admitted that these are complex
issues. When the need arose to progress from instinctive to clear consciousness
in this field, attempts were made to do this from the point of view
which has come to be the scientific way of thinking over the last centuries.
I think there is no need here to pay homage yet again to the scientific
approach that evolved as the proper one to explore the secrets of external
nature. Where the secrets of external nature are concerned this method
which has arisen from the teaching of Copernicus, of Galileo, has certainly
proved fruitful. Mankind has got well used to this method in the course
of recent centuries, using it to bring clarity into a system of nature
but dimly perceived with the aid of the senses.

Then the necessity arose to
get a clear picture also of human relationships in social life. It is
not surprising that people first of all applied the skills acquired
in the study of external nature to these human relationships. That is
how our views on economics and social economics have arisen, ranging
from those merely promulgated from professorial chairs to what millions
upon millions of people have come to believe, and finally to Marxism.
I have discussed this in my
Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage.
[ Note 2 ]
Efforts were made to understand how
capital has its functions, to analyse labour as a factor in the social
context, and the effects of the circulation, production and consumption
of goods. All these things form part of a highly complex situation,
and the whole thing presents itself to the soul in living processes,
I would say, with infinite potential. Even the best of scientific methods
will not be adequate for the processes discernible here, and it is because
they have not been adequate and nevertheless have been persisted with
in the effort to penetrate the social life that we are today finding
ourselves in such a wretched situation on the widest scale, for the
whole world. Anyone wanting to go deeper than the surface and penetrate
to the depths of our social problems will of course realize that they
have to do with what I have just tried to present to you. Social forms
cannot evolve out of the kind of thinking that has proved effective
in science. The kind of thinking however that works its way through
to Imagination, taking hold of something objective and coming to expression
as something that is alive and astir rather than at rest — a process
offering infinite potential within a relatively narrow sphere or also
covering a large area — such a process will penetrate this changeable
life that has to do with capital, labour, economics, etc. It will be
able to come to grips with what is alive in the social order of man,
and that really is not surprising, for the things to be discerned in
the life of mankind do after all arise from within man. The inner life
of man is the life of soul and spirit, or at least it is governed by
soul and spirit. When we come upon the social order we therefore come
upon something spiritual. No wonder it needs spiritual methods to penetrate
social issues.

Ladies and gentlemen, forgive
me if I bring a personal note into this now — but it was this which
gave me courage to look for the spirit where it reveals itself in the
immediate intercourse of man's social life. I did so on the same basis
on which I wrote my
Philosophy of Freedom,
my
Theosophy
and my
Occult Science — an Outline.
That is how I came
to take the road that led to my
Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage.
I speak with a personal note, but behind this personal note lies my
objective conviction as regards the way man can gain insight into the
social order, an order that he must create very consciously today, which
of course means out of the spirit. That is the one thing.

The other — I am merely
giving examples of the life fruits yielded by anthroposophical research,
and I could give many such examples — the other thing I want to
mention is something we may encounter when considering the human organism.
We see this before us in the first place in its outer form. The enveloping
part of this outer form hides the internal organs. In physiology and
biology we study the morphology, the structure, of these inner organs.
There is no other way so long as we stay within the context of science
as we know it today. In reality, however, the lungs, stomach, heart,
liver, kidneys, all the organs of man are not as they present themselves
to the eye when it looks at them in their enclosed form, in a structure
that on the whole, I would say, is in the resting state, particularly
in so far as we perceive them with our senses. No, these organs merely
pretend to have such a configuration, for in the living human being
the individual organs are constantly alive and stirring. They are anything
but organs at rest in a finite form, they are living processes. In fact,
we should not really speak of a lung, a heart, of kidneys and a liver.
We should speak of a heart process, the sum total of heart processes,
the sum total of lung processes, the sum total of kidney processes.
Everything that goes on there is in a constant process of metamorphosis,
though this is so much shut away that the whole may well be taken for
a fixed form, and indeed has to be taken as such from an external point
of view. From a view that only sees this form, a form that really only
reveals the outer aspect, we need to advance to the living process,
to something that fundamentally speaking changes into something else
at any moment in these organs, to whatever it is that really gives rise
to the process of life out of these organs. This cannot be done by using
our senses; we can only achieve it through an inner vision that is alive
and astir, and this is given in imaginative perception.

Social processes are such
by nature that they run away from us in their complexity, as it were,
when we approach them with scientific concepts, and the processes in
our lungs, heart, liver, kidneys are such that they really hide their
inner nature if we apply those ordinary scientific concepts to them.
We penetrate into those processes that have shut in upon themselves
through Imagination. On the one hand. Imagination is able — if I
may put it in such ordinary terms — to run after those volatile
complex social processes. On the other hand it is able to resolve the
resting form falsely apparent in human organs into the ever changing
life of organic processes. These are then perceived directly, not arrived
at by speculation or deduction. For in scientific research based on
the senses, thinking has to limit itself to what presents itself in
the phenomena. Beyond that it has to transform itself into a living,
supersensible view. It is only then that it enters into the reality
of what goes on there, hidden from sensory perception also where individual
organic processes are concerned.

This is the way to achieve
fertilization of science-based medicine, a discipline given full recognition
by spiritual science. We can achieve this with what spiritual science
is able to add to that science-based medicine. Spiritual science does
not wish to ally itself with quackery, with the mystery mongers in therapeutics.
No, in this field, too, spiritual science wants to take into account
all genuine research, genuine findings based on sensory perception,
but it wants to take them further, to those secrets of life that we
also need to uncover if we want to enter into the wholeness of life.
Such penetration will then yield fruits again for life itself as we
meet it in sickness and health, or in human community life. It will
make it possible to perceive the fruits of life that arise out of the
perception gained in Anthroposophy of elements beyond the world of the
senses.

All this then comes together
in something I should like to define as follows. People often think
that materialism can be overcome by abandoning the whole world of matter
to the outside world, in a way saying goodbye to it in one's mind and
then ascending into an abstract spiritual sphere, into ‘cloud-cuckoo-land,’
and mystery-monger around there. They consider material life as something
inferior which we must rise above. Oh yes, if we do this we shall rise
to a state of mind that is very pleasant to be in, a kind of Sunday
pleasure for man's spirit after the rough weekday work we devote ourselves
to in the material world that we do after all inhabit. That is not the
soil on which genuine anthroposophical science can be established. Anthroposophy
aims to grasp the spirit in such a way that once it has got hold of
it in its working, its creative activity, it can follow it right down
into the finest tendrils of material life. It is important for a spiritual
science of the kind I am speaking of to do more that establish that
in addition to a body consisting of brain, lung, liver and so on man
also has a soul and a spirit. That would not take us far beyond talking
around things in mere words, for it leads to abstract notions of the
world which we inhabit between birth and death. The aim of spiritual
science is to immerse itself in everything with the spirit it has taken
into itself, to say how spirituality, something essentially spiritual,
is active in every single human organ, how the essential nature of lung,
liver, stomach, etc. is comprehended in the spirit, how spirit and soul
are present everywhere in the whole of the human organism, directing
the light of the spirit to every single cell, so that there shall be
nothing that is not illumined with the light of the spirit. Then it
is no longer a question of matter on one side and spirit on the other;
then a unity has arisen, joining what in abstract terms is seen as spirit
on the one side and matter on the other. And the same applies to the
social life.

We must let the spirit enter
right into reality, and ourselves enter into reality with it. Then the
human soul achieves profundity and the ropes and strings I have spoken
of in these evening lectures [ Note 3 ] enter
into man's awareness. These are the ropes and strings that stretch
from the innermost being of man to the innermost nature of the cosmos,
the spiritual connection between man and cosmos and, as we become conscious
of them, a living flowing movement arises, an inhalation and exhalation
of the cosmos, I would say. Something which otherwise is grasped only
in theory, in abstract concepts, becomes living experience within free
spirituality; it becomes transparent as only ideas can be and on the
other hand also as alive as only life itself is, and as free as only
the freest of actions can be, yet wholly objective, though in this case
the objective element has to be grasped in free spirituality. This is
why it is necessary to enliven the faculties that normally fight their
way to the surface unconsciously in man, enliven them out of this spiritual
research, this insight into the spirit.

People who are artists justifiably
feel a certain aversion when it comes to the usual academic studies.
And modern aesthetics, evolved out of the thinking of more recent times,
a form of thinking habitual to science, is also something artists avoid — justifiably
so, for it is something abstract, something that leads away from art
rather than into it. Spiritual science does not lead to such abstract
concepts. It brings to life what to begin with was merely concept, idea,
and this in turn enlivens the other faculties of man. This is why the
soil from which this spiritual science is growing is also able to produce
genuinely artistic work, in a truly natural way. The art we cultivate
at Dornach — tomorrow I will be showing some samples of this in
pictures — and anything else drawn from the same soil from which
spiritual science has arisen, eurythmy for instance [ Note
4 ] — has nothing to do with translating some idea or another
into an artistic approach. No, it is merely the soil that is the same,
this soil being the living creativity of the whole human being.On one
occasion he will evolve ideas and that will be one branch; another time
the other branch, the artistic one, will arise from the same root. That
is also why I have always felt extremely uncomfortable when tendencies
to produce allegories, to symbolize, emerged within the anthroposophical
movement. Anything artistic will have to arise from the same source
as Anthroposophy, but it is not Anthroposophy translated into art. And
so a particular life-fruit is brought forth in the sphere of art, like
those briefly referred to in the field of social life and in medicine.

If we consider how man is
there brought together with what is immortal and eternal within him,
with the forces that give him form out of the spiritual world, we will
also understand why the insight in experience and experience in insight
gained through Anthroposophy also has to do with deeper religious feeling.
In an age which has grown so indifferent to religion we need fundamental
religious forces again. We need ways that lead to the areas of spiritual
experience where fertilization may be found for man's artistic
work, for everything to do with the value and dignity of man. Such fertilization
comes from the centre that is God. It is a perversion of the truth to
ascribe sectarian tendencies to Anthroposophy, for it certainly has
no such intentions. It is a perversion of the truth to believe that
it wants to be a new religious foundation. It does not want to do any
such thing, for the simple reason that it is endeavouring to understand
the progress of human evolution the way it really is. Here we must say
that the divine powers that fashioned the world and guided the evolution
of man were in earlier times understood in accord with men's capacity
to understand. We need to progress to different metamorphoses of perception
and of motivations; we need to make our souls appreciate the eternal
in accord with the thinking of modern times. Of course, spiritual science
will not be speaking of a Christ other than the Christ who has gone
through the Mystery of Golgotha. But spiritual science has to speak
of the qualities of insight and perception which it considers necessary
in the 20th century, also where the Christ event is concerned. People
who base themselves on some particular confession may feel afraid that
the ground will be taken from under their feet by Anthroposophy. They
have to be asked again and again: Is someone who is all the time afraid
that the truths of Christianity may be diminished really someone who
truly professes Christianity? Or is it the person who knows that however
many millions of discoveries are made on the basis of the physical world,
the soul or the spirit, these can only make the genuine truths of Christianity
appear to the soul in even greater glory? No one would ask why there
is nothing in the Bible about America, and someone who might have wanted
to raise objections to the discovery of America by basing himself on
the Bible would have been just like someone who today wanted to fight
the views put forward by anthroposophical spiritual science by basing
himself on the Bible.

It is necessary to take an
honest look at these things and think them through in honesty. Otherwise
the element contained in denominational religion must always be a drag
on genuine research. Yet if genuine research penetrates to the spirit
in the way anthroposophical spiritual science wishes to do, it will
yield the very life fruit that consists in new life coming to the religious
element in the human soul. We need to bring the findings made in our
researches in the different worlds into harmony with the element which
represents our religious awareness and feeling. And we do not take anything
away from the religions when we try to establish harmony, justifiable
harmony, a harmony based on insight, between their truths and what has
been shown to be the quality of knowledge in different epochs. Our age
in particular shall also have this life fruit out of anthroposophical
work, a deepening of a religious life which has grown indifferent. When
this fruit ripens, it will be from this direction that the warmth and
enthusiasm will come which we need if we are to make progress as Christians
in this time of decline. Any insights we gain into social life, into
the human organization, anything we may produce in the sphere of art:
all this can only further the evolution of man if there is the warmth
of man's innermost nature and his creative power behind it. This
is to be found in the truly religious feelings of mankind.

Opposition to these spiritual
scientific researches is particularly powerful at the present time.
This is profoundly bound up with the fact that contact has gradually
been lost with reality. On the one hand, attention is directed to a
nature which has had all spirit removed from it, so that modern science
is not able to perceive it in its true complexion but only in its outer
form perceptible to the senses. On the other hand, attention turns to
the spiritual world, perhaps in mere certainty of feeling — I spoke
of this yesterday — but here men are unable to get beyond abstract
concepts. All of this has its root in the fact that people have gradually
grown too lazy to want to grasp the spiritual in spiritual freedom,
in free spiritual experience, in inner activity. Yet that is the only
way in which the spiritual can be tracked down in every nook and cranny
of the material world. Science finds its truths by very close adherence
to outer events, basing them on experience, on experiment. No effort
is made to think beyond what random experiments, random observation
reveal, and a habit has developed of replacing the former dogma of revelation — as
I put it in my earliest writings [ Note 5 ] — with
the dogma of evidence, evidence of the outer senses. As a result we
have grown dissatisfied in our heart of hearts. Within the soul's capacity
for experience, we have got out of the habit of gaining the objective
experience that is independent of anything in the outer world; we do
not have free inner experience. This free inner experience is what we
must seek above all else if we want to achieve genuine spiritual research.
It is also what people are now resisting most strongly.

I would like to give you an
example, not with the intention of using a recently published essay
to settle accounts in these lectures with regard to some objection or
other which has been raised against spiritual science in the light of
Anthroposophy. No, it is not my intention in these lectures to deal
thus directly with any particular opponent, least of all with what has
been said in the essay I am referring to. The writer of that essay is
dealing with something quite different from anthroposophical spiritual
science, about which he knows nothing. He has tried to analyze it on
the basis of hearsay and after glancing at perhaps a single book and
hearing certain reports, in perfect sincerity — this one has to
admit — and to the best of his ability. I do not want to discuss
the points that essay makes with regard to spiritual science. I merely
want to consider the issue in the light of cultural and contemporary
history. This extraordinarily distinguished author [ Note
6 ] refers to the exercises he has been told I describe, exercises
to enable man truly to take the path to the spiritual world in his soul
life. And he has obviously also heard or read that the initial, very
elementary exercises consist in spending five minutes in reflection
on a neutral object. A thought is held on to in genuine inner freedom,
when one is under no compulsion and merely follows something one has
willed oneself. To indicate what really matters I therefore said one
could use a pin or a pencil, for the object one was thinking of was
irrelevant.

It is not a matter of becoming
absorbed in the thought content, but of the thought process being held
on to for five minutes, the thought process being transferred to the
sphere of free activity. We are not used to keeping our thinking activity
within the sphere of free activity in ordinary life. Turning our thoughts
to an object we want to rivet attention on that object; we keep it in
our thoughts for as long as it holds our attention. It will never be
possible to enter into spiritual science in this way. On the contrary,
such an approach turns us aside more and more from supersensible study
and intuition. [ Note 7 ] It is quite typical
for a person who insists on continuing in the decline that shows itself
in the present time to say: ‘I could not manage that at all at
present; and I am afraid, yes, I am afraid, that however much I try
to overcome myself I shall never learn it. On the other hand I have
been accused of being so engrossed in an object that held my interest
that for more than five minutes the rest of the world no longer existed
for me.’

That is exactly the opposite
path. If we get so engrossed in an object that the rest of the world
no longer exists for us, we are given up to that object, we have relinquished
our freedom to that object. That is the essential point: to take an
object that does not rivet our attention, and keep that object in awareness
for five minutes out of inner strength and freedom. It therefore is
enormously typical when someone says: T think I prefer to leave such
a faculty to people who have nothing in their lives that holds sufficient
genuine interest for them to keep their attention for five minutes.’

This is a famous man of the
present age, and there is so much that holds his attention, keeping
him unfree, over and over again, for five minutes and probably more — let
us assume this, to give him his due — that he never gets to a point
where he is able to hold a thought complex in his mind for five minutes.
This he intends to leave to people who are not as enthralled with the
outside world as he is. It also shows him to be completely bound up
with the modern point of view, the modern way of thinking and feeling
which has evolved and which I have defined for you tonight. That is
a long way from the essential aim of spiritual science which is to enter
with one's mind into the sphere of free thought activity.

Another example I have given
of the way man may enter into such a sphere of independent thought is
the meditation on the Rose Cross I have described in the second part
of my Occult Science. You can look it up there, how the exercise should
be done. The author I am referring to had the following to say on this:
‘The cross does not infrequently come before my mind's eye,
without volition’ — so again it does not come when called
to mind in freedom, but involuntarily — ‘but it is not a
black cross, say of polished ebony, but an absolutely ordinary crude
gallows tree, a dirty grey in colour. No circlet of seven radiant red
roses hangs on this cross, but a cadaverous man, sorely beaten, who
is going through the tortures of death, and indeed the tortures of hell.’

So you give an exercise that
is designed to lead to inner freedom of thought, and this person can
think of nothing else but what comes to mind under the powerful compulsion
of his whole upbringing, out of the whole of his life habits, and he
even considers this to be the acceptable, the right thing. With such
an attitude of mind it will never be possible to reach what spiritual
science really has to offer. That man had no need to refer specifically
to the cross I spoke of in my Occult Science. It could, for instance,
have happened to him that someone somewhere spoke of the cross formed
by the transom and mullion in a window, describing this to him. And
in that case, too, he might have said: ‘You have no right to speak
of that cross in the window, for what comes to mind for me is not a
cross formed by transom and mullion and painted a reddish brown, say,
but always a black cross that is a crude common gallows tree’
and so on. And if someone were to try and tell the man how a cross is
used in analytical geometry, the cross formed by ordinate and abscissa,
he would stop them from doing so. Even if Einstein were to draw the
abscissa and ordinate for him, he would conceive of nothing else but
his crude gallows tree. We must consider these things with regard to
their true content and it will become obvious what forces are present
in our time that lead in directly the opposite direction to what is
such an urgent necessity today with regard to social issues, religious
and scientific issues — as I hope, Ladies and Gentlemen, you have
been able to see.

It is not surprising, then,
that the author in question also says something else that is indeed
most curious. I have presented the Akashic Record, as I have called
it, [ Note 8 ] as something through which man
tries to develop his thoughts to such an extent that he is able to survey
cosmic evolution through inner activity. What I had to depend on was
that when such things are described they are received in an inner soul
state that is kept alive, with this soul state elevated in free spirituality
to what is open to supersensible perception. But this man said the following:
‘And — believe it or not — I do not even find it difficult
to abstain. Even if Dr Steiner were to present me with an illustrated
special edition of the Akashic Record, I would not bother to read it.’
Well, this man seems to imagine an illustrated special edition of the
Akashic Record may be presented to him, so that he can be sure to stay
passive, so that there would be no question of anyone counting on his
inner soul activity.

It certainly is necessary
for anyone wishing to participate in working on the powers for a new
beginning coming into our time to view such things dispassionately,
without antipathy, seeing them as they are — all the elements of
transition and decline. Many people stand there and are not even aware
that they have these powers of transition in them, and a great many
others rush after them — thousands and thousands of people. They
are keen to follow such passive religious natures because they want
to remain passive, because they do not want to take hold of the one
thing that is so essential: objectivity, the essential nature of objectivity — that
is, to take hold of the supersensible in free spirituality. That requires
an active inner soul state, a free inner soul state.

That is what I want to say
in conclusion, summing up: Anthroposophical spiritual science aims to
foster supersensible insights, insights that lead to the kind of results
I have briefly defined these last few days. Anthroposophical spiritual
science does not want to lead up to dead concepts that tell us only
of a dead outer reality. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not
want to limit scientific work, the discovery of truth, to the kind of
results an abstract intellect gathers like wilting leaves from the outer
reality perceptible to the senses, wilting leaves that dry up as they
are translated to the human soul and in drying up paralyse man's inner
strength.

Anthroposophical spiritual
science wants its findings to be true life fruits, not wilting leaves,
life fruits that may become spiritual nourishment for the living soul,
just as the circulating blood provides nourishment for the body. For
this to be possible, spiritual science needs to breathe the air of freedom.
Perception has to be taken into the spiritual atmosphere of freedom,
a freedom that is able to awaken the greatest depths of the human soul
and make them perceptive, and at the same time also awaken them to the
ability to act in genuine freedom, act in a way that may establish harmony,
social harmony among men. Certain things will have to happen in the
social organism that of necessity must arise from the present and into
the immediate future. In the final instance this has to arise from what
man attains to in full conscious awareness and free perception, is able
to experience in his innermost soul as the independent life fruit of
such perception, and is able in turn to bring into human society as
a whole, in social action. This will lead to mankind out of the present
and into the immediate future through powers that are not those of decline
but of a new beginning; it will lead mankind to a new element that is
human, healing and creative.